From: fedora@fea.st
On Sun, 1 Feb 2026 09:35:34 -0800, Dude wrote:
>On 1/31/2026 3:12 PM, Noah Sombrero wrote:
>> On Sat, 31 Jan 2026 13:44:44 -0800, Dude wrote:
>>
>>> On 1/31/2026 10:30 AM, dart200 wrote:
>>>> because billionaires don't have morals, and are slave to chasing what
>>>> they perceive as profit regardless of the effect of others
>>>>
>>>> there's a reason rich people can't make it into heaven
>>>>
>>>> cause we can't even build heaven when rich people exist
>>>>
>>> Because it's obvious that you are biased by even using the term "rich".
>>> There's a good reason people don't want to be equally poor.
>>
>> And good reason why that is not necessary.
>>
>I'm not sure you've thought this through.
>
>Wealthy people donate the most to charity and pay most of the US income
>tax. Poor people pay no income tax and get charity.
>
>So, what's wrong with this picture?
Your assumptions behind it.
>
>>>
>>>> On 1/31/26 7:53 AM, Julian wrote:
>>>>> A few years ago, Dario Amodei was just another techie in San
>>>>> Francisco, toiling in relative anonymity and playing video games on
>>>>> Sunday nights with his sister, Daniela.
>>>>>
>>>>> Fast forward to today. Amodei is worth billions. He runs one of the
>>>>> fastest-growing companies in the history of capitalism, and flits
>>>>> around the globe — Davos one week, Washington the next — to warn about
>>>>> the rise of an all-powerful artificial intelligence that could snuff
>>>>> out humanity.
>>>>>
>>>>> The 43-year-old engineer, bespectacled and with the earnest bearing of
>>>>> an academic, would be forgiven for feeling a bit of whiplash. Sales at
>>>>> Anthropic, the company he co-founded with his sister and that is
>>>>> behind the popular Claude chatbot, have risen from zero at the outset
>>>>> of 2023 to more than $9 billion (£6.5 billion) last year. And this,
>>>>> apparently, is the thin end of the wedge.
>>>>>
>>>>> AI is now developing so fast that it is pushing us towards a reckoning
>>>>> unlike any faced by any generation. “It cannot possibly be more than a
>>>>> few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything,”
>>>>> said Amodei. “I believe we are entering a rite of passage, both
>>>>> turbulent and inevitable, which will test who we are as a species.”
>>>>>
>>>>> In short, he is worried about the power of the machines that he, and
>>>>> others, are building. So last week, he did the equivalent of pulling
>>>>> the fire alarm, publishing a 19,000-word blog post titled The
>>>>> Adolescence of Technology. The gist: governments, companies and the
>>>>> public need to wake up to the tidal wave about to crash over society,
>>>>> in the form of machines, with Nobel prize-level competency, that will
>>>>> be as common and accessible as a toaster.
>>>>>
>>>>> “Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is
>>>>> deeply unclear whether our social, political and technological systems
>>>>> possess the maturity to wield it,” Amodei wrote.
>>>>>
>>>>> His missive read like a health warning for the human race. Bad actors
>>>>> could soon use AI to build bio-weapons. AI tools themselves might
>>>>> simply decide to exterminate humans. Mass job displacement and
>>>>> societal upheaval were almost guaranteed, within as little as one to
>>>>> five years.
>>>>>
>>>>> Beyond the alarmism, his post scratched at a deeper question. When
>>>>> OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released in November 2022, it was a “moment” — a
>>>>> singular event that kick-started a global AI boom. Yet doubts have
>>>>> begun to percolate as governments and companies have swept aside
>>>>> regulations to frantically erect data centres and pour hundreds of
>>>>> billions into the sector. Anthropic and its rival OpenAI may be
>>>>> growing like weeds, but they are also losing astounding amounts of
>>>>> money. Thousands of other start-ups have cropped up in their wake, but
>>>>> none has yet made a dent in the universe.
>>>>>
>>>>> The law of averages means that most never will.
>>>>>
>>>>> So are we simply caught in a bubble, inflated by blinkered west coast
>>>>> techies? Or are we, instead, on the cusp of another “ChatGPT moment”,
>>>>> when the technology starts to deliver on the hype, for good and for ill?
>>>>>
>>>>> “I think 2025 was maybe the most interesting year in my entire career
>>>>> and probably life. I would expect 2026 to exceed that,” Marc
>>>>> Andreessen, the billionaire tech investor, said last week. “This stuff
>>>>> is really working now.”
>>>>>
>>>>> ‘Smarts’ aren’t all we need
>>>>>
>>>>> Nearly 3,000 miles from Silicon Valley, Ethan Mollick, a professor and
>>>>> co-director of the Generative AI Labs at Wharton business school in
>>>>> Philadelphia, offered a more nuanced view of a technology that is both
>>>>> advancing with incredible speed but seeping relatively slowly into the
>>>>> real world.
>>>>>
>>>>> He had recently finished teaching a class of MBA students in which
>>>>> they were given three days to launch a start-up, from conceiving a
>>>>> business plan to creating a prototype, with help from AI. “They did
>>>>> ten times more in three days than they would have got through in a
>>>>> semester not long ago,” he said. “That’s a real thing.”
>>>>>
>>>>> What he saw in his classroom appears to accord with Amodei’s own
>>>>> experience. Two years ago, AI was “barely capable of writing a single
>>>>> line of code,” Amodei wrote. Now, he said, it writes “all or almost
>>>>> all of the code for some people — including engineers at Anthropic.
>>>>> Soon, they may do the entire task of a software engineer end to end.”
>>>>>
>>>>> Now extrapolate this to every other task that requires grey matter. AI
>>>>> will be better, and not by a little bit: 10 or 100 or 1,000 times
>>>>> faster and smarter than humans. “It is hard for people to adapt to
>>>>> this pace of change,” Amodei said.
>>>>>
>>>>> Yet that dotted line — from coding agents to the end of the economy,
>>>>> society and the world as we know it — reflects Silicon Valley’s
>>>>> uniquely simplistic world view, Mollick said; it’s based on the
>>>>> assumption that everyone will instantly bin the old way of doing things.
>>>>>
>>>>> “There’s this hand-wavy idea that smarts are all you need — that AI is
>>>>> a bunch of geniuses in a data centre,” he said. “But a genius without
>>>>> hands, for example, may be enough to make it far less useful for a
>>>>> huge amount of work.”
>>>>>
>>>>> Indeed, OpenAI’s flashy new recruit, former chancellor George Osborne,
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